


miles to go

by scullyseviltwin



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, self-care, there's a lot of exercising in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-23
Updated: 2018-05-23
Packaged: 2019-05-12 23:59:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14738253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scullyseviltwin/pseuds/scullyseviltwin
Summary: One evening, on a whim, he tugs up his shirt in front of the mirror and is pleasantly surprised that his gut isn’t hanging over the waistband of his jeans, not a bit. Belatedly, he realizes that he hasn’t smoked a cigarette in months, and hasn’t wanted to.He feels… stronger, more awake, like he could actually pass the physical exam for the force, if he had to.





	miles to go

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to [astudyinrose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/astudyinrose/pseuds/astudyinrose) for her beta and continual support of my nonsense.

High cholesterol.

 

It’s what had gotten his father. That and high blood pressure had caused the old man’s heart to seize and throw in the towel. He’d only been fifty, and Jim remembers, at twenty-five, trying not to cry by the graveside.

 

High cholesterol, the doctor tells him.

 

“A lifestyle thing, I’d guess,” she says, impersonal, not even looking at him across the cold cubicle of an exam room. “Being a cop, must have a wonky eating schedule, and then there’s the donuts.”

 

“I’m not a friggin’ clich é ,” he lies, glancing down at his bare calves peeking out from the curtain of the hospital gown.

 

“No worries, Mr. Hopper.” The young woman turns around as she takes off her latex gloves. “Change of diet, and a prescription for...” she turns back, searches the countertop for her pad and scribbles on it.    
  
“Pills?”

 

“You said coronary heart disease runs in your family,” she says, replacing her pen in her coat pocket.

 

“I said heart attack. That a fancy word for heart attack?”

 

She smiles at him and holds out the tiny slip of paper between two fingers. “It’s a fancy way to say get your ass in shape if you want to see sixty.” And just like that, he’s put in his place. Middle aged, with a beer gut and signs of diabetes. “Get me?”

 

“Got it,” Jim says, chastened.

 

“Right, put on your pants and we’ll see you out front.”

 

\---

  
  
Jim fiddles with a pack of smokes before giving in and sliding one out. He cradles the soft, papered end between his lips and stares at the butane lighter he’s carried since Vietnam. He flicks the dial a few times, listening to the scrape of metal on flint.

 

Ultimately, he plucks the cigarette from his mouth and tosses it, whole, into the overflowing ashtray.

 

When he slams the truck into drive, he nearly breaks the gearshift.

  
  
\---

  
  
Jim doesn’t do a damned thing differently for two weeks. His refrigerator is full of beer and some rapidly-shrivelling apples that Jane refuses to eat; his freezer is packed with frozen meals and a half-empty bottle of cheap vodka.

 

There’s a kid in the house, so he’s started grocery shopping with a bit more care for her, but he doesn’t change a thing about himself. 

 

Pre-packaged, individual pastries, bags of potato chips, and soda bottles reside in the kitchen cabinets. In his mind, he excuses himself because the ease with which he can access these things and put them in his mouth is great; it saves him time, and that’s important.    
  
When he comes in the door from a long day, he begins cooking their dinner and cracks a beer or three. He wonders why the hell he can’t sleep at night, and why he wakes up feeling like a bus hit him when he does sleep. Jim finds every excuse in the book, between diagnosing himself with generic insomnia, to blaming his health issues on the paranormal happenings of the past few months. 

 

But he knows why. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he acknowledges that his age and his lifestyle are factors driving him to an early grave. 

 

It’s not a mystery, he just doesn’t consciously acknowledge it. His powers of ignorance are great, and it’s not until he has a chest pain so vicious that he finds himself driving to the emergency room that he decides that he’s going to have to start making some changes to the way he lives his life. 

  
\---

 

“Just acute angina,” the doctor says, taking a seat across the gurney from him.

 

Jim just grunts, picks at the paper cup of ginger ale in his hands.

  
  
“You taking these meds that were prescribed, looks like… two months ago?” he asks, over the rustling of the paper contained in Jim’s chart.

 

His face is a blank mask as he blinks at the doctor.

 

“Right. You planning to start?” The doctor holds up the results of Jim’s EKG as though to draw his attention to them, as though they haven’t just discussed them. “Because if you don’t…”

 

His jaw set, and with a little huff of anger, Jim nods.

 

“Good. Maybe add some exercise, too. And don’t tell me you don’t have time. That’s what everyone tells me, right before they keel over.”

  
  
He grunts again and downs the cup of soda, just to have something to do.

 

“Run, or something,” the doctor continues, scribbling on his clipboard. “Lift weights, swim, I don’t know. Find one of those treadmills somewhere. Something. Okay?”

 

“Yeah,” comes the reply, a bit more heated than Jim had intended.

 

The doctor blinks once, and then again. He doesn’t believe that Jim is going to change a damned thing, and Jim can read it all over his face.

  
  
“Let me get your discharge papers,” he says with a disappointed sigh. 

 

\---

 

He’s not sure about this running thing; it seems pointless. Even as an athlete in high school, he never needed to work out much. He carried enough bulk that it had made sense for him to  be a right tackle. He lifted twice a week with the team, but otherwise, ate like any other teenaged kid and managed his physique just fine. 

 

He passed the army physicals without much trouble, coming in just under the cut for mile time. The NYPD made him go through the usual shit — the physical and the agility test — but once he was on the force, they didn’t much care. 

 

Somewhere between Vietnam, Sara and Diane, and putting his ass on the line to save the world, he forgot how to be healthy. In more than one regard.

 

He picks up  _ The Complete Book of Running  _ on a whim in the middle of perusing the grocery store for a detective paperback, and though it’s from ‘77 and out of date, he figures seven years couldn’t change terribly much, flipping through it for tips.

 

For the first month he feels like  a lumbering jackass, feels every bit of his body mocking him. He makes it half a block before collapsing into wheezes and vocally cursing cigarettes — and himself — for succumbing to them so often. But after the first two weeks, he makes it five blocks without stopping, and then seven. By the end of November, he can go  a mile before he has to take a short break.

 

Not bad, for a novice, he figures. Not bad at all, for a new runner. 

 

And after he picks up an old set of barbells from Hank Stevens, he starts lifting, too. Twice a week becomes three times a week, then four. Soon he’s out buying new sweats and tee-shirts, because he can’t keep up with the laundry, between his own dirty workout gear, and El’s ever-growing wardrobe. 

  
  
He told Joyce and Nancy to stop buying things for her, but they insisted that in order to feel like a normal girl, she needed a normal wardrobe. Normal, however, had meant fashionable, and that meant learning that there were other settings on the washing machine besides “normal.” 

  
  
So he works out, now, has a schedule, feeling half a fool and half fantastic for it. 

 

And it was only when he has to change belt holes that he notices that he is making visible progress, and if he happens to start paying a bit more attention to his appearance around that time, he can’t be blamed.

 

\---

 

He runs—literally—into Joyce one day. He wasn’t trying to  pass by the store, but he wanted to go up the other end of Main Street and there was no other straight shot.

 

She’s sitting at the picnic table in front of the store with a magazine and a Coke; he slows to a canter, content to catch her in an unguarded moment. But when he gets closer, the slapping of his sneakers on the pavement causes her to startle, drop her magazine. She looks up and exclaims, “Hop?”

 

“Yeah, hey,” he says, realizing belatedly that his sweatshirt is soaked through from his exertion, and his hair is probably plastered to his face, and—catching his reflection in the window of the bait and tackle shop—he’s as red-faced as the devil.

 

“What are you doing?” she asks, face agape, straw halfway to her mouth, as though catching him running is truly the most bizarre thing she could have dreamed up.

 

He sucks in a quick breath, trying to calm his thudding heart. He’s got the excuse of exertion to blame it on, but he knows his heart would be thudding right now regardless of the workout. “Uhm, running?”

 

Joyce blinks once, and then visibly shakes off her surprise with a buoyant, “ _ Why _ ?”

 

The laughter breaks free of him without conscious thought. She looks so genuinely confused; he can’t help it. “Uh, I don’t know. After everything, and realizing how winded I was getting…”

 

She gives him a once over, head to toe, but still looks decidedly suspicious. Not that she can be blamed; they’ve both been through so many insane things, this is another in a long line of unnatural behavior. “Okay…”

 

He shrugs. “Just trying to, you know, get back in shape. Or, as in shape as a flabby forty-three year old man can get.” He pats his stomach for effect, but she just raises a brow, pointing at him with the tip of her straw.

 

“You’re not flabby, Hop,” she says, stabbing her straw back into the can and taking a sip of her Coke, pointedly refocusing her attention on her magazine.

 

The words hit him like a stun to the chest. He glances across the street, and then back, through the window of the shop, unsure for a moment of what he’s heard. Jim finds his hand hovering over his stomach. “I’m not?”

 

“No.” She glances up at him briefly, meeting his gaze for only a moment; it takes him a beat to realize that her cheeks have tinged just the slightest bit pink. ”Stop fishing for compliments and… finish your run.” And cool as a cucumber, she flips the page in her magazine as she worries the end of the straw between her teeth. 

  
  
It takes him a second to heed her words, still a bit rattled by her having anything to say about his body at all. 

 

“See you around,” he mutters, not wanting to inquire as to anything further, not wanting to make the moment any more strange than it already is. “You still bringing the boys by tomorrow night?”

 

“Tomorrow,” she confirms. For the briefest of moments, she glances up at him, a tiny smile perking the right side of her mouth. “Bye, Hop.”

 

“Bye, Joyce.”

 

\---

  
  
Winter is a bitch.

 

He isn’t going to join a gym, because he isn’t a roid-head and he doesn’t particularly take to the lycra-and-aquanet sort of place that’s all the rage these days. He has to buy gloves, thicker sweats, hooded neoprene type outfits that cost a goddamned arm and a leg for trekking through the slush and snow. 

  
  
He hates it, every second. Mostly.

 

He doesn’t hate when he can make it all the way up the steps behind the high school, twice, without wheezing. Mid-January brings some brutal weather, but after he’s mastered those steps, he begins thinking of the weather as something else he has to fight against, and Jim is best when he has an identifiable adversary. Six o’clock in the morning often sees him on trail runs through the forest, sometimes with El by his side.

 

She finds it exhilarating, leaving him in the dust and letting him catch her up. She slips over rocks and downed tree trunks, breathing in the sharp, icy air as crisp leaves crunch beneath her feet. Jim likes that part of it just as much as she does; the sensory overload that befalls him when he’s running through the forest is a nice distraction, and if he happens to be spending quality time with El too, well, that’s a bonus.

 

\---

 

February vacation is a goddamned nightmare. 

 

Joyce only manages to get a single day away from the store–”College is expensive, Hop. You have to start thinking about that!”–and he offers to take the squadron of middle schoolers to Indianapolis for an afternoon, just to give the parents a break. 

 

It’s certainly not legal, the way he packs the five of them into the cab of his truck–Dustin rides  shotgun, because he wants to have all of the functionalities of a police truck explained to him–but it’s the only way to get them down there. 

  
  
Hivemind takes over and the kids go absolutely insane once they reach the Science Museum. He doesn’t bother trying to keep up, just tells them to meet him back in the lobby in three hours—”Not a second later!”—leaving them to their own devices.

 

He meanders downtown, grabbing a seriously overpriced coffee drink that’s mostly milk, and retraces the footsteps he left around the city as an undergrad at Butler. None of the dives he remembers are still in business, but around Rookwood he finds an athletic apparel store. 

  
  
The amount of shit that he gets for his new Nike trainers after Lucas discovers them beneath the driver’s seat almost makes him regret buying them.

 

Almost.

 

Joyce comments on them when she runs into him at the grocery store. He’d finished up a run and jumped immediately into his truck, already late to pick up Jane from school. They had plans to go grocery shopping together, as Jane had taken to reading his cookbooks, and there were things she wanted to try. 

  
  
She’s off somewhere in produce and Jim is scanning the ingredients on a box of crackers when he gets an elbow in his side.

 

“Hey,” she says, one hand on the handle of a cart.

 

“Christ,” he laughs, putting the box back on the shelf. “Scared me.”

 

“Almost didn’t recognize you,” she says, glancing down at his feet. “Those don’t even look like shoes, they look like socks.”

 

“Ah yeah,” he says, hand going to the back of his neck; he’s still a bit shocked by the color, too. Bright yellow, thin material with black straps. She’s right, they don’t look like shoes. “They’re called uh, Sock Racers? ‘Parrently triathletes wear em?”

 

“Triathletes!” Joyce laughs. “You’re uhm, really going all out with this whole… self improvement thing.”

 

“Go big or go home, right?”

 

Joyce simply looks at him for a moment, gives him a cursory once-over, and sighs. The smile on her face is sweet, startlingly genuine. “Well, getting healthy looks good on you.”

 

“Does it?” he asks, going for a joke, but his voice dipping into the ‘sly’ territory.

 

She doesn’t take it as humor, simply gives him another up-and-down glance and pushes off her cart. “Yeah, it does.”

 

He thinks about her words for days, how her eyes had taken their time raking over his body. He feels slightly objectified, but isn’t surprised at all to find that he’s entirely okay with it. After all, it’s not as though Joyce had never seen him in a fit state. They’d gone to high school together, but the  difference was, back then he hadn’t had to do anything extra to keep up his bulky-but-tight frame. 

 

She’d never looked at him like that, back then. Coquettish, sure; she’d batted her eyelashes at him, blushed and grinned, but never anything as distinctly and plainly appreciative as what she’d done in the grocery store. 

  
  
It means something, he knows it means something, but after everything that’s happened, he thinks that maybe her feelings are misplaced.

 

Maybe she’s still rebounding from Bob.

 

Maybe a million things.

 

____

 

One evening, on a whim, he tugs up his shirt in front of the mirror and is pleasantly surprised that his gut isn’t hanging over the waistband of his jeans, not a bit. Belatedly, he realizes that he hasn’t smoked a cigarette in months, and hasn’t wanted to. 

  
He feels… stronger, more awake, like he could actually pass the physical exam for the force, if he had to. 

 

Not bad, he decides as he turns to the side and looks at himself in profile.

 

Not bad at all. 

 

\---

 

“Numbers are way down, that’s great,” the doctor says, ticking something off on his chart; Jim can’t help but allow himself a brief smile. “Hard work pays off, eh?” It’s the same woman who had given him the prescription the first time around, and she seems genuinely pleased with the progress he’s made.

 

“Any chest pains?” she asks, swiveling around on her stool to face him. “When working out or when not working out?”

 

“Not since mid-November,” he informs her. 

 

By the end of it, she commends him on his health, though lets him know he’s not yet completely out of the woods. “Just keep it up, maybe start keeping an eye on the salt.”

 

Jim groans, “Now you’re telling me I gotta cut out salt?”

 

“Not entirely, just go a bit lighter on the shaker.” She rips the used paper off of the exam bed and tucks her clipboard under her arm. “Okay, new dosage on those meds, and I’ll see you out front to schedule your next annual.”

 

He picks at the bandage on his arm; he’d not considered that he’d be around another year, not in a long time. 

 

\---

  
  
By March, he needs to increase the weight he’s lifting. He adds some twos and fives to his collection of standard plates, and finds a press bench for cheap at an estate sale. A corner of the cabin’s living room is furnished with second-hand workout equipment, and he’s taught Jane how to bench press—just the bar—with his help.

 

They still eat frozen dinners once in awhile, but they’re be accompanied by a salad, or steamed broccoli. He’s learning to cook more ambitiously, too, taking to the thrift store to snatch up dog-eared and fading cookbooks. 

 

When he brings Joyce a frozen lasagna as a thank you for letting Jane sleep over, she just lifts the foil edge of the dish and peers inside. “Learning to cook, too? You’re an overachiever,” she jests, hand against her hip as she smiles brightly at him.

 

“Tryin’ my hand at it, yeah,” he says, unable to help the blush that threatens to creep above his beard, shoving his hands deep into the pocket of the three-sizes-slimmer jeans he’d bought just that morning. “Figure… kids can’t just eat Hungry-Man and pop, yah know?”

 

Her eyes do something strange then, morphing from confused, to amused, to surprised and affectionate. Jim feels so damned off-kilter that he starts back towards the truck without Jane in tow, and without saying a proper goodbye. He stops, turns, and tries to play it off like he’d meant to make a move like that all along. “Well, uh, tell me what you think of the lasagna. And I hope you like eggplant.”

 

“I do,” Joyce says, maneuvering to clutch the casserole dish to her stomach as the smile on her face tips from charmed to goofy. It’s a delightful look on her, and it does something to his stomach. 

 

He’s taken, to be sure. Standing there on her front porch, bare feet and baggy jeans, she looks all of seventeen again. Memories slam into him, hard: Joyce beneath the biggest tree at Conner’s farm, moonlight in her hair, staring with such expectation; Joyce at the homecoming game, her eyes finding his, even from the stands; Joyce, saying goodbye to him through the torn screen door of her parents house, as he’s about to leave for college.

 

He’s never considered second chances, finds them to be one of the more saccharine, fated, nonsensical things that lonely people say they’re waiting for. But now, here, standing in front of Joyce on an overcast afternoon and feeling his heart kick double time, he wonders if maybe he’s being given a chance.

 

Jane emerges from the home, Converse thwacking down on the worn wood of the porch and backpack slung over her shoulder. She hugs Joyce, thanks her properly like she’s been taught to, and hops over the porch step to the dirt, following Jim to his truck as he waves over his shoulder in parting.

 

Once inside, he can feel Jane’s eyes falling on him, focusing on him until he can’t bear the scrutiny any longer. “What?” he asks, feigning innocence, his voice pitching a bit higher as he fiddles with his keys.

 

Jane blinks at him several times as he manages to finally get the key into the ignition. “You already know she likes eggplant.”

 

Jim swallows, takes a moment before be responds. Jane is perceptive as all hell and he knows he really shouldn’t bother trying to hide something so obvious from her, “I do, yeah.”

 

“Then why did you pretend like you didn’t?” she asks, all full of innocent bluster, but Jim knows better. She’s a quick study, is nearly at an appropriate reading level, and has come to understand human nature in a way that children her age just shouldn’t be able to. 

 

Jim pulls out of the driveway, slaps at the blinker lever and takes a left. “It’s just… something you say. It’s adult stuff.”

 

“No it’s not,” she murmurs, her eyes still burning holes into him. “Don’t lie,” she goads, and it carves into him. 

 

No lies.

 

They’ve promised one another.

 

He huffs out a heavy sigh as they turn onto the state highway. “Any way you’ll let it go?”

 

Jane smiles, slides down in her seat, sneakers up on the dash, and lets her head loll to the side. “You like Joyce…you  _ like _ like her.”

 

“Alright ,that’s,” he tries to insert some sort of authoritarian tone into his voice, but he can’t manage it. “Enough.” It’s the truth. He does  _ like _ like Joyce. Heh has, for as long as he can remember. 

 

“Okay,” Jane placates, grin evident in her voice as she fixes her gaze out the window. “You’ve got it  _ good _ ,” she tries.

 

Her idiomatic mistake makes him smile, but he still doesn’t want to discuss anything like this with her—or anyone, for that matter. “Kid, the expression is ‘you’ve got it bad’, and no. I don’t.” But she’s thirteen, and if she can read this on him, who knows who else can?

  
  
It doesn’t matter; none of it matters. He has a new routine, a kid to raise, he doesn’t have the energy to think about this.

 

But he thinks about this _ all the damned time _ .

 

“Okay,” she draws out, singsong, and he turns on the radio, effectively ending the conversation.

 

\---

 

Maybe he runs past Melvad’s more than he should. And if he times those runs on his days off to coincide with times when he knows Joyce usually takes her breaks, he can’t really be blamed. He’s got so few friends left in this godforsaken town that accidentally running into a friend is difficult going on impossible.

 

And Joyce isn’t really just a friend, anyway.

 

Joyce is something else,  _ someone _ else entirely. 

 

Sometimes she’ll have a bottle of water ready for him, along with her bag of carrot and celery sticks. They’ll sit on the uncomfortable picnic table out front, talking about the kids, or the improvements Joyce is making to the house with the stipend she’s getting from what they both suspect is the U.S. Government.

 

It feels oddly intimate, dropping by her work with a sandwich for each of them, asking about her day, having to stop himself from moving that unruly piece of bang out of her eyes. 

 

It’s frustrating that he can’t touch her, can’t take her in his arms, but he can’t stay away. There are very few people in the world who have ever made him want to be really, deeply, good, and the others are all in his past. She’s made him want to live up to his reputation, be strong and brave; she’s made him want to be someone he’s proud of. 

  
  
Keeping away isn’t an option, and neither, it seems, is telling her how he feels, and so he resolves to push it all back and wall it off, brick by brick. 

  
  
He’s good at that.

 

Lunches are fine, he decides. Totally normal interactions between friends, unlike dinner. Stopping by the store is alright, as long as it’s under the guise of his workout.

 

\---

  
  
Jim ups his reps and his miles, takes long treks through the woods, hoping that the spring chill will drive thoughts of Joyce from his mind. It’s ridiculous and makes him feel so immature, that he can’t stop thoughts of her flitting across his mind. He’s always wondering how she’s doing, what she might be thinking, where she might be at any given time. 

 

It’s a breezy Sunday morning, just gone eight o’clock, and he’s halfway down to the creek when the realization that he’s  _ always _ felt this way about her slams into him. It stops him in his tracks and he skitters, kicking up leaves.

 

Oh, damn.

 

It’s been the reason — he forces himself to reason, as he sucks in cleansing breaths — that he never made a move on her. Because that would have been it, even at seventeen, he’d known that she would have been _ it _ for him. He would have either stayed in Hawkins or asked her to come with him to Indianapolis.

 

But he couldn’t have stayed in a town that made him feel like he was being suffocated, and he couldn’t ask her to leave her sick father. So  _ he’d  _ left, chin held high, with a promise to stay in touch, a pact he never made good on. 

 

And now, a quarter of a century later, he’s still got the urge to tuck her body into his, still gets a thrill when she reminds him what a strong, capable, resilient human she is. 

 

Jim glances up at the sky — patches of blue between budding branches — and sighs. 

 

Fuck.  

 

\---

 

Joyce invites them over for dinner on the first weekend in April. 

  
  
It turns out that Jane and the boys have made plans to enter a tournament at the arcade, so it’s just the two of them. He doesn’t cancel because, if he does, he fears that would mean admitting to himself what a dinner between the two of them might mean. 

 

And he certainly doesn’t want to be rude. He wants her in his life, and friends have dinner with one another from time to time. 

 

It’s fine; it’ll all be fine.   
  


He offers to cook because  _ why not _ , and because he’s rapidly realizing that apart from enjoying cooking, he’s actually really good at it. And he wants to cook for her, wants to make her something he knows she’ll enjoy, wants to be the person who brings a smile to her face. 

 

He’s pauses on her porch and brushes out the wrinkles he just assumes are marring his shirt. His hand — palm sweaty — is poised to knock at the worn wood of the door, mulling over how exactly to say something as simple as “Hello” when he’s pulled up short as the door flies open. 

 

“Oh!” she squeaks, looking just the slightest bit frazzled. “Hi!” Joyce is donned in a bright, floral dress he never would have imagined she owned, holding out a small area rug. “Was just finishing…tidying.”

 

He racks his brain and comes up with absolutely nothing to say, though his face breaks into a smile. She tosses the rug down and takes a step back, pressing at the fabric over her thighs. “That can… wait,” she smiles at him, her mouth shifting from one side to the other. It hadn’t occurred to him to consider that she might be as nervous as he is. 

  
  
Her mouth presses thin, and then she smiles again, shaky this time. “So uh, come in?

 

Moving past her into the home, he pulls up short, feeling remarkably awkward. Joyce closes the door and clears her throat. He stutters over his words, grasping at anything at all to say. “Looks like you uh, did some cleaning.”

 

She pauses with a hand on the doorknob and laughs. “I just uh—”

 

“Right, you said that!” he catches up.

 

She shakes her head, and looks at him with such unabashed delight that the tension drains from his body.

 

“So,” she wrings her hands, gesturing to the bag in his hand as she steps into the kitchen. “What’s for dinner?”

 

His gaze falls on a bottle of wine, set into a banged-up sterling ice bucket on the counter. Without the chatter of children, or the din of the television, the kitchen feels entirely too intimate, small. Jim wills himself not to panic, or jump to conclusions, and instead hefts the bag onto the counter. “A, ah, pasta...thing.”

 

“Pasta is…” Joyce rummages in a drawer for a moment, before coming up with a corkscrew. “Nice.”

 

“Hard to mess up,” he jokes and begins unloading the goods. 

 

The sound of the cork being freed from glass echoes in the silence. “Stop,” she implores and pours out two glasses. “I’m sure it’ll be great.”

 

For a time, he cuts and measures and pours and stirs. She hovers, tidying up for him as he goes, making sure his glass is topped up. They chat about nothing — about the kids and the weather and the upcoming gubernatorial race. For a while, he loses himself to the process, carefully chopping and dicing, letting the conversation flow without focusing on it too diligently. 

 

“So. Hop.” Joyce says, and pauses. He turns, making eye contact with her as he stirs in a bit of parmesan cheese. 

 

“Yeah?”

 

Her fingers twist around one another, pulling until she huffs out a breath and meets his gaze. The silence between them is also palpable, and Jim shifts from one foot to the other, just for something to do. He’s half-numb, and half ready to bolt out of the door at the way her eyes seem to be begging him. She takes the briefest little sip of air and then gusts, “What’s, uhm, happening here. Because…”

 

Jim waits.

 

Joyce rolls her eyes and slaps her hands down at her sides, against her thighs. It’s as though she’s startling the next words out of herself. “I’m glad the kids aren’t here tonight!” she says, and appears almost shocked that she’s said it, rolling her eyes at the ceiling. “I…wanted to see what would happen…if we were…”

 

The silence is oppressive and begs to be filled. 

 

“Alone?” Jim supplies, surprised he’d been able to speak at all, his mouth is so dry.

 

Her eyes flickers wide and she licks her lips. “Yeah. Alone.”

 

Jim freezes for a moment, entirely unsure of what to say. What is there to say, what could he possibly say that wouldn’t fuck all of this up? He twists, reaches for the range knob and turns down the heat beneath the slowly-simmering sauce.

 

When he meets her gaze once more, it breaks his heart to find she looks entirely lost. His first instinct is to take her into his arms, but they’re not there yet. There are still all of these words between them, some spoken, some waiting to be, that need voicing before any of this is okay.

  
  
And yet, he can’t speak. 

 

Joyce keeps her gaze trained on him, and he allows himself to feel everything he’s ever felt before, summoning all of his bravery. He can be brave for himself; he can most certainly be brave for her. It’s the least she deserves.

 

His lower back finds the edge of the counter and he leans, breathes, considers. “I’m…yah know, I’m glad we’re alone, too.”

 

“Okay,” she breathes, relieved. “Good.”

 

“I just,” he starts, feeling his hands about to gesture in submission, but he reigns himself in. This isn’t a goddamned firing squad. No need to be this on edge. This is Joyce.

 

He’s known her his entire life.

 

His  _ entire life _ . 

 

“Joyce I…don’t want you to think…that…shit.” He scrubs a hand down over his face. “That this is all just because of what’s…happened with all of us, this year. I don’t want yah to think…”

 

Trailing off, frustrated, he pushes away from the counter and plunks down in an empty chair; for a moment, he tips his head back to stare at the ceiling.

 

Joyce clears her throat and shuffles closer to where he’s seated. “And I don’t want you thinking it’s because you’re getting all…muscly,” she says, reaching for a joke, but it does nothing to put him at ease. “I think, I mean I think you know…how I…” Joyce catches her bottom lip between her teeth and she rounds the table, taking a seat across from him. “I like you, Hop.” She shakes her head at herself, chuckles quietly.  “No, not like…I mean…”

 

He’s still staring at the ceiling, shakes his head with incredulity when he says, “I’ve been carrying a torch for you since eighth grade. S’that pathetic?”

 

She takes an audible little sip of breath and then says, gently, “I don’t think so…I…am I pathetic?”

 

Jim lifts his head, rights himself in the chair and runs a hand through his hair, levelling an even gaze at her. “I don’t wanna do this anymore, Joyce.”

 

Her tongue touches her bottom lip and it takes her a moment to ask, “Do what?”

 

Jim huffs in annoyance at himself, at the stilted way in which he’s talking around this. “Pretend that…I don’t care! When I do! Pretend that I don’t care as much as I do. I…”

  
  
The tiny little flutter of a smile touches her mouth. “Okay. Neither do I, is the thing.”

  
  
There’s a pressure in his chest that he vaguely registers as something like fight or flight. “So whadda we?” He doesn’t finish, just runs his palms over denim clad thighs and hangs in limbo.

 

“Well,” Joyce ducks her head, blushing, and swallows. She’s taking her time, and he’s glad for it. “What about…what about…”

 

And she’s standing, the skirt of her dress swaying just so, hypnotizing him to stillness until he feels her palms against his cheeks. She only has to bend a little before she’s brushing her lips against his mouth, the slightest pressure. 

 

She leaves it at that, pulling away to check in, meet his gaze, and she smiles at him. It breaks the statis; his hands come up to cup her hips, bring her gently back in between his legs. And she dips, simple as anything.

 

This is something else entirely. They come together and Joyce steps in, applies more pressure, takes the lead. It’s slow, the way she parts his mouth, sighing into him. Her hands slip around his shoulders, one resting against the nape of his neck, the other draped so her fingertips tickle his back.

 

He hangs on, lightly grips her hips and lets her guide them through this. It’s so easy to slip into her mouth, so easy to bring her into his lap and cradle her as they kiss. It’s a heated thing, with a promise of more, and Jim is thankful that they have dinner ahead of them. It’s something to slow them down; otherwise, he’d have no qualms about moving their evening into the bedroom.

 

Years of womanizing have set that propensity in him, and it’s not what he wants with Joyce. He wants the slow ebb and flow, the intimacy and camaraderie that they share to build and solidify, he wants to feel all of it, when they first come together. He doesn’t want to just take her to bed, he wants them to have the time and the space to find one another.

 

She traces a few, lingering kisses down his neck before allowing her forehead to fall to his shoulder.

  
  
“Okay?” she whispers, shaking.

 

“Sh—yeah, okay,” he says, and they both laugh, their bodies quaking gently against one another. 

 

When she pulls back, her face is flushed, cheeks a rosy pink, and he can’t help it, he kisses her one, last time. “Alright,” he says pulling away. “Get off my lap or I can’t finish dinner.”

 

Her smile is saucy as she manuevers off, smoothing down her dress where it’s ridden up. 

 

Jim stands and clears his throat, feels the grin that’s tilting his lips move to fill his cheeks. 

 

He turns back to the food with a spring in his step, checking on the sauce and chopping up the vegetables he intends on adding. She lingers, still, glass of wine dangling from her fingers as she watches the process. 

 

“Lotta vegetables, there,” she teases.

 

His sidelong glance is barely annoyed. “Goes along with the whole ‘being healthy’ thing,” he counters. 

 

Her smile is slow to creep up on her face. “I like it.” She holds her wine glass in both hands at her waist, and shrugs. “I uh, gave up the cigarettes.”

 

“Oh?”

 

“Yeah, yeah. Seemed…like a good idea. I mean, I didn’t think you’d like it after you….Quit. If we, you know, kissed. Didn’t want to chance it.” When he turns to glance at her, she looks mischievous, the light in her eyes dancing. 

 

“Being presumptuous there, Byers.” He winks and then sprinkles a bit of salt into the pan. 

 

She’s quiet for a moment before she says, “I don’t think I’m being presumptuous at all.”

 

Her tone, and the implication, makes his knees wobble a bit. They’re on the same page, which is good, but he knows he wants to take this slowly, do it properly. Jim places the wooden spoon down in the cradle between burners and turns to slides his palms against her sides. “No, you’re not. But…you think—”

 

“I want to take this slow, too,” her voice is low and gentle, even as she maneuvers her arms tentatively around his waist; her thumbs hook into his pockets. 

 

He decides the sauce will keep a few more minutes, and leans in to kiss her in the way he’s always imagined kissing her.

 

Deeply.

  
  
Slowly.

 

\---

 

They carve paths through the woods, as a unit. Serpentine routes around felled trunks and stagnant pools. 

 

Sometimes, Will and Jane crunch along with them, but more often than not, it’s just the two of them stomping through nature in their boots. Joyce likes to snag rocks she thinks are interesting, and Jim makes note of the trees he can divide up later, with an axe. 

 

He brings her outside, and her skin loses some of the winter pallor it always seems to carry. She tells him that she wants to find a pool and begin swimming again. Her breaths are more even, she doesn’t wheeze.    
  
They find summer together, in between discovering the few farmers markets and spending scorching afternoons at the zoo. His heart beats, fuller and slower now.

 

He has time, now, to take things as they come, to let what’s happening between he and Joyce quietly take hold and blossom. 

 

He has time.

 

They have time. 

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
